Comment by AndrewKemendo

I am co-founder of a residential trash collection cooperative: seegull.org I started in 2022. Bought a trash truck last year and we start picking up earnestly in May. We’re both part time cause we don’t have enough business yet to be full time.

No two cooperatives operate exactly the same and you should think about it more like a family than a business. It’s not a purely transactional thing I’m not keeping track of inflows and outflows because I don’t have anybody else to report to other than my cofounder and we treat it like a family business.

Really the only thing you have to keep in mind is that the single thing that makes you cooperative is that there is no distinction between worker and owner.

Depending on your state there are some obscure tax codes that make your org legally a “cooperative” but that doesn’t really mean anything because you’ll be taxed on revenue like everyone else

So you could set it up as an LLC and then within that LLC you run it as equal distribution based on whatever the cooperative agreement is between all the parties.

In our case there is no equity, there’s no assignment of shares, there’s nothing to cash out. Revenue comes in and is used for operations and then distributed to whomever did the work.

For a SaaS because capex is low you have a ton of options, but again if people join your org who want to make money or get rich, then the cooperative will eventually just turn into another company.

One of our new marketing efforts is: we have a brief weekly ops call that we’re just sharing only two so far: https://open.spotify.com/show/4jekdwCcjWKYJd7NSh6KlA?si=eFEI...

At the end of the day a cooperative is about creating an alternative and equitable social group of mutually supportive people, and the way you sustain it is secondary but important

If you start it as a money making enterprise then you will eventually turn into fully into a money making enterprise

However if you start as a social group that has a reason for existence more deeply rooted than financial gain, then you might actually have something that survives.